Weaving together sound, movement, objects, film, and light, Art Performs Life, through artifacts and reconstructions, will create new landscapes out of props, costumes, stage sets, film, audio, laser-video projections, recordings, and photographs, allowing the viewer to experience the aesthetic drama of each artist's highly visual, performance-based work.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Merce Cunningham changed the language of contemporary dance by incorporating everyday movements into his choreography and experimenting with chance arrangements. His experiments were extended to his collaborators in music and the visual arts, breaking down the hierarchy between these disciplines and freeing dance from its traditional molds. Art Performs Life will feature major notations, scores, sets, costumes, and videotapes chronicling such critical works from the Cunningham Dance Company repertoire as Minutiae (1954) with music by John Cage; Summerspace (1958) with set and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg; Rainforest (1968) with set by Andy Warhol and music by David Tudor; Walkaround Time (1968) with set design by Jasper Johns after Marcel Duchamp; and more recent collaborations with Charles Atlas, Leonardo Drew, and Mark Lancaster.

Since Meredith Monk's early avant-garde experiments of the mid-1960s, she has forged a singular vision of performance working as a director, choreographer, composer, singer, and filmmaker. A pioneer in what is now called "interdisciplinary performance" and "extended vocal technique," she has created more than 100 works that range from large-scale music-theater productions to films, videos, site-specific works, and installations. Art Performs Life will focus on the extraordinary marriage of performance, sound, dance, film, and art in Monk's interdisciplinary work. Included will be films, audio, sets, costumes, and storyboards from such works as 16mm Earrings (1966), Education of the Girlchild (1972), Quarry (1976), and Atlas (1991).

Bill T. Jones has created more than 40 works for his own Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company as well as for numerous other dance companies. Since the 1980s, he has been heralded for the sensuous and often athletic style of his movement, which has been described as "sculpture in motion." His performances often transgress the traditional boundaries between public and private through the themes explored--sexuality, gender, race, spirituality, life, and death--as well as by the use of non-artists as performers in his works. Art Performs Life will feature installations that reflect the mixed-media nature of Jones' recent works, often collaborations with well-known modernists of the past two decades, including video artist Gretchen Bender, composer David Cunningham, and visual artist Keith Haring. On view will be works that combine movement, music, spoken word, and special effects, including Secret Pastures (1984), Freedom of Information (1984), Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990), and Still/Here (1995).

A 176-page fully illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition will include an introductory essay by Sally Banes, Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; interviews with the artists conducted by Ann Daly, Associate Professor of Dance History/Criticism at the University of Texas, Austin; Thelma Golden, Curator and Director of Branches at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; novelist-poet-critic Jamake Highwater; dance critic-teacher Deborah Jowitt; and Laura Kuhn, Executive Director, John Cage Trust, New York; and artist chronologies.

Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, Bill T. Jones is made possible by generous support from AT&T, the National Endowment for the Arts, Dayton's Frango® Fund, Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Voyageur Companies. Related performance programs are supported by John and Sage Cowles.

This exhibition is part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative. This museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th-century art is made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.

Curators: Siri Engberg, Kellie Jones, Philippe Vergne